There have been three historical periods marking partisan family development: the Progressive Era, in which Republicans embraced a Hearth family economic ideology and Democrats were more aligned to the Soul family values approach; a midcentury, post–World War II period in which the Hearth ideology emerged as clearly dominant across both parties; and finally, the late twentieth-century period, when the Republican Party championed the Soul family ideology as never before. The period since the 104th Congress is especially significant because of the strong partisan character evidenced in the introduction and cosponsorship of Hearth and Soul family bills since then. Sponsorship and cosponsorship of Hearth bills were now much more strongly correlated with Democratic members of Congress, while bills espousing the Soul family values approach were much more correlated with Republicans. The polarization in family ideology, as evidenced in bill sponsor/cosponsorship data as well as party platforms, is thus both a recent phenomenon as well as one reminiscent of an earlier, albeit more muted, period at the start of the twentieth century.
This chapter’s assembly of the historical development of the two parties’ family ideologies over time is important for at least three reasons. First, unlike issues of race or gender, the parties’ shifting (and reversed) position on the family has gone largely unnoticed in political science literature, and the description and classification of this empirical phenomenon are therefore necessary and worthwhile. Second, this assembly situates the more recent partisan focus on the American family within a larger historical frame, demonstrating that the two parties have long relied on family economics and values as discursive frameworks to address and approach family in policy. Third, the chapter also reveals specific dynamics that engender empirical puzzles: Why did family burst into political significance in the late twentieth century? Why did the Soul ideal gain unprecedented political traction in the late twentieth century despite being unable to gain a strong foothold previously? More generally, why have the parties framed and adopted their approaches to family differently in different eras?
The phenomenon of partisan family ideational development illustrates broad mechanisms in the dialectical nature of party ideologies themselves. The historical development of family party development is thus also important in that it begs investigation into the precise dynamics that shape the emergence of distinct party family ideologies—why the parties separate or converge on family. By so doing, it is possible to address the larger question of why parties adopt the ideologies and positions that they do and identify the conditions and contexts in which parties change and sometimes reverse their ideologies. The next three chapters do this. As in-depth case studies, they reveal the contexts and conditions under which Democrats and Republicans formed their family ideals in the Progressive, post–World War II, and late twentieth-century periods. Cumulatively, the chapters demonstrate the ongoing relation between state and society as the parties interact with demographic family change and shifts in lived families’ experiences and attempt to translate them into coherent policy ideologies, to attract constituents and gain electoral traction and success.
Chapter 2
The Progressive Era: In the Path of the Juggernaut
In 1893, ten-year-old Flossie Moore’s life changed irrevocably. On the brink of insolvency, her family had been farming on rented land in the Piedmont countryside in North Carolina when her father died unexpectedly at the age of forty-three. Suddenly, her mother found herself in dire circumstances and responsible for eight children whose ages ranged from infancy to nineteen. After harvesting that year’s crops and seeking the advice of kin, Mrs. Moore moved her family to the textile mill in Bynum; as Flossie remembered, “there were several of the men that come out and met first, trying to decide what to do…. They knew about Bynum, and it was a good little place to live.… And of course the cotton mill was running here then. And the ones that was old enough…. Well, I went to work at ten years old.”1 So began the Moores’ new life as wage laborers in the mills, living in a company house in the mill village, with younger children earning alongside their widowed mother and older siblings. The Moore family experience was similar to that of millions of families in the Progressive Era (1890s to 1920s), caught in the midst of “the juggernaut,” the turbulent tide of industrialization that was then engulfing the nation, with families experiencing upheavals and massive change in their struggle to survive and keep afloat.2
The structural transformation accompanying the move from a rural, agrarian-based economy to an urban, industrialized one had marked effects on all families, not merely those on the brink of destitution. Rising divorce rates, falling birthrates among the so-called better sort of people, the changing position of women, and a revolution in morals caused great alarm,3 as did rising family poverty, child and adult mortality, and death and disease in urban families.4 The economic and cultural dislocations accompanying the nation’s industrialization were mirrored in the microcosm of family’s shifting dynamics.
Family economy moved beyond the household, with several family members now employed in factories, canneries, and textile mills across the nation. Burgeoning labor markets as well as the transitory nature of several establishments meant low and sporadic wages for most working-class fathers. Mothers supplemented the family income either by home work (such as piecework, taking in laundry, boarders) or increasingly through wage labor outside the home, working as domestics and charwomen in private homes, office buildings, or railroad cars or in laundries or garment, textile, or cigar factories.5 Children often worked—boys as messengers, newsboys, or factory hands and girls in department stores and textile factories. Dangerous and harsh industrial conditions, rising mortality and disability, and crowded urban and unsanitary living conditions all meant that most working-class families could expect to lose at least a few members, adding to the family’s economic vulnerability.6
More affluent families also underwent transformations. Women began to move out of sheltered Victorian home life; they received higher education in growing numbers and challenged traditional gender roles by joining social clubs, engaging in voluntary and/or professional work, and becoming more politically active.7 Children were no longer mini-adults; instead, through a variety of social movements—for compulsory schools, playground creation, and child labor regulation—childhood began to be viewed as a separate time of innocence, play, and leisure, distinct from the demands of adulthood.8 Aided by technological advancements in transportation, fathers often traveled great distances to work and so spent many more hours outside of the home. With fathers now more rigidly associated with breadwinning, childrearing came to be firmly relegated to the sphere of mothers.9
Policy changes accompanying these family shifts were embedded within prevailing party politics, which was also in a state of embroilment.10 The election of 1896 had marked the beginning of the Fourth Party System, in which Republicans were favored nationally but dominated in industrializing northeastern and midwestern states,11 and Democrats were elected primarily from agrarian states in the South and West.12 This emerging alignment marked a new era of Republican-dominated party competition, replacing the preceding “state of courts and parties” in which either party could equally hope for victories after every election.13 As entities with distinct regional bases, political parties by and large channeled sectional interests. The Republican agenda was informed by the northern core’s manufacturing interest, and the Democratic agenda was shaped by the southern and western periphery’s agrarian interest. These commitments, however, were not rigid; instead, each party’s ideology was more an amalgam of various positions, formed from a looser, more shifting coalition of interests than what came to be the norm later and into today.14
The political climate in the Progressive period was notably infused with the fervor of reform. Reformist groups decried the excesses and vagaries of the patronage-based political and laissez-faire economic systems and advocated instead widespread civil and social reform. Interest groups were active and attempted to press their agenda on the electorate, Congress, and state legislatures.15 In a style of politics reminiscent of the late twentieth century,
